Gordon Moore's prediction of doubling transistor counts every 2 years revolutionized the computer industry and his company, Intel. (Source: New York Times)

An NVIDIA VP is declaring Moore's Law dead and GPUs the only hope for the industry. (Source: TechCrunch)

In NVIDIA's eye the parallelism of the GPU is the only future for computing

NVIDIA
has struggled this time around in the GPU war. Its first
DirectX 11 products were
delivered a full seven months after AMD's.
While its new units are at last trickling onto the market and are
very powerful, they're also hot, loud, and power hogs. However,
NVIDIA is staking much on the prediction that the computer industry
will be ditching traditional architectures and moving towards
parallel designs; a movement which it sees its CUDA GPU computing as
an ideal solution for.

Moore's Law stemmed from
a paper [PDF]
published by Gordon Moore 45 years ago this month. Moore,
co-founder of Intel, predicted in the paper that the number of
transistors per area on a circuit would double every 2 years (later
revised to 18 months). This prediction was later extend to
predict that computing power would roughly double every 18 months, a
prediction that became known as Moore's Law.

Now with die
shrinks becoming
more problematic, NVIDIA is convinced the end is nigh for Moore's
Law (and Intel). Writes Dally:

Moore's
paper also contained another prediction that has received far less
attention over the years. He projected that the amount of energy
consumed by each unit of computing would decrease as the number of
transistors increased. This enabled computing performance to scale up
while the electrical power consumed remained constant. This power
scaling, in addition to transistor scaling, is needed to scale CPU
performance.

But
in a development that's been largely overlooked, this power scaling
has ended. And as a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore's Law
is now dead. CPU performance no longer doubles every 18 months. And
that poses a grave threat to the many industries that rely on the
historic growth in computing performance.

Dally
says that the only near-term hope for the computer industry now that
Moore's Law is "over" is parallel computing -- splitting
workloads up among a variety of processors. However, he derides
multi-core efforts by AMD and Intel, stating, "Building a
parallel computer by connecting two to 12 conventional CPUs optimized
for serial performance, an approach often called multi-core, will not
work. This approach is analogous to trying to build an airplane by
putting wings on a train. Conventional serial CPUs are simply too
heavy (consume too much energy per instruction) to fly on parallel
programs and to continue historic scaling of performance."

He
concludes, "Let's enable the future of computing to fly--not
rumble along on trains with wings."

In other words, he
hopes you will buy NVIDIA GPUs and join the "Moore's Law is
dead" party.

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